> OK--but how much human suffering do you think your non-kosher
> solution would inflict? I suppose a lot of problems could be
> solved by simply killing or ethnically cleansing the the
> population found to be troublesome--but it's more than mere
> political correctness that dulls our inclination to accept
> such solutions.
A part of far-eastern wisdom which I admire calls for a judicious and restrained use of force. That is so refreshingly different from the Western Janus-face concepts of either unrestrained display of power and agression (sometimes backed with deeds and sometimes not) or unconditional proscription from using any force whatsoever (pie-in-the-sky pacifism).
The use of force and coercion is an unaviodable fact of life. The point is, however, to use them judiciously. That implies taking the big picture into account, considering all imaginable options, and chosing the one that entails the least amount of destruction.
The fact of the matter is that violence of various stripes (such as person to person, person to group, group to group, group to nation, and nation to group) is almost certainly going to increase in the foreseeable future for one simple reason - more and more people have the means and opportunities to efficiently inflict this kind of violence. That is to say, people acted violently throughout recorded history, but the limited availablity of destructive weapons and means of communication put severe geographical limits on the spread of such violence. An angry man could ax-murder his wife or a neighbor but he could be incapacitated by other members of the community before inflicting more damage. A group of angry bigots might have staged a lynching or a pogrom but that violence was unlikely to spread over a larger terrotory maninly due to the lack of effective means of communication to state similar events acrossa wide geographical area.
That changed quite dramatically when weapons and means of global communication become readily available to virtually anyone who wants to acquite them. And since human nature is essentially opportunistic, people do thing because they can, especially when can do them with impunity. That means that terrorist and criminal violence is likely to intensify and become more and more deadly.
>From that perspective, a discomfort inflicted by forced relocation of
communities particulalry prone to generate violence (either criminal or
terrorist) is lesser evil that unrestrained escalation of violence.
Hence forced relocatioon and other coercive means of re-engineering of
violence-prone communities appears to be lesser evil than do nothing
approach which almost certainly will lead to escalation of violence.
That, of course, must not be confused with "ethnic cleansing" which
involves forced relocation to attain narrowly defined political payoffs.
Wojtek